Information Technology

We have a range of high-end Dell workstations in our offices. These are mostly equiped with 32 or 64 bit xeon or dual core 2.8 or 3.2 GHz processors with 4GB RAM, and in excess of 300 GB of storage. Each workstation has dual screens and is connected to high speed internet. A range of low-end workstations are used for data entry and processing. We have a variety of normal and semi-rugged field laptops for downloading data from our field instrumentation and entering data at our field sites. All of our labs and offices have access to high speed internet and 802.11g wireless. We use wireless 802.11n and 802.15 for some of our field based instrumentation however.

Office and lab software includes Microsoft XP and officeprofessional. Our GIS and image processing software include ArcGIS with a variety of extensions and ENVI. Our statistical software includes Systat, Jump, and PC Ord. Our preffered software for handling large datasets is PostGre SQL. We use a rnge of software for communicating with our various field-based instrumentation.

We have two server enclosures and 11 quad core RAID 5 blade servers. Each is equiped with 8GB RAM and in excess of 170 GB of storage. These servers are also linked to a SAN device with 4 TB of storage. Our servers are situated in the RADC at UTEP's central server farm. The servers are connected to Internet II and the LEARN network. These servers in clude production servers and development servers that run our various web sites and applications and/or are used for application and database development and testing.

We run server 2005 on all of our blades. Our websites are developed in Plone. The majority of our web-based mapping applications are built using ESRI's ArcIMS. We also use ESRI's ArcGIS Explorer and Google Earth for our 3D web-based mapping applications. We are currently developing several beta applications using ESRI's ArcServer software suite. Our geodatabase is built with SQL 2005.